The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Watching "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" is a bit like seeing an obsessive-compulsive fourth-grader working on a diorama for school.  The attention to detail is incredible.  But what's the point?

Director David Fincher has painstakingly crafted every frame of the film, as he always does.  There are lots of terrific touches, like the sound of a whirring janitor's vacuum adding a sense of dread to one scene.  Or the terrifying black make-up that shrouds the heroine's eyes in key scenes.  Or a shot from the point of view of a hostage, with a plastic bag over the camera.

Unfortunately, this is all in the service of a silly potboiler.  "Tattoo" is one of those mysteries which throws out tons of details, most of which mean nothing.  It features a comical number of montages of our heroes doing detective work: riveting stuff like computer hacking, looking at files, and questioning the elderly.  The thing is over two-and-a-half hours long, yet it still feels rushed.

What's worse, "Tattoo" shamelessly throws in some disgusting material that wouldn't be out of place in an exploitation film.  There are three scenes featuring sexual assault and, of course, Nazis.  (Though not together.  Really a missed opportunity.)

Now, I don't mind depravity in some contexts.  Tarantino uses lots of crude violence, but it's all so cartoonish and stylized that it's mostly entertaining, rather than sickening.  Fincher's "Se7en" included numerous disgusting killings, but used them to explore the moral degradation of society and how we should respond to it.  "Tattoo," by contrast, is just using some "CSI" style gross-outs as a cheap way to hold the audience's attention.

(Another craven ploy: showing off Rooney Mara's naked body.  The filmmakers really ought to be ashamed.  It's 2012 and Mara is asked to bare flesh at every turn, with nary a male booty in sight.)

The bigger problem here, as is usually the case in Hollywood, is money.  The strings attached to studio financing are now so great that it's incredibly difficult to make a good movie for eight figures or more.  So a talent like Fincher has to work on a pointless commercial exercise like this if he wants to get the budget to which he's accustomed.

I've long felt that directors need to scale down their films so that they can avoid the inane ideas of Hollywood producers.  Take Martin Scorcese.  For years, he's wanted to make "Silence," a film about two Jesuit priests in Japan in the 17th century.  But studios are (understandably in this case) reluctant to back it.  So instead he wasted his time on "Shutter Island," a piece of schlock that did well at the box office.  (Scorcese is said to be working on "Silence" now, so hopefully he's learned to keep the budget in check.)

Fincher is so meticulous that making a film on the cheap may be impossible for him.  For "Tattoo" he spent an entire afternoon shooting close-ups of drawings of flowers, which are shown for only a few seconds in the film.  You simply can't spend that kind of time on a smaller production.

I wish he'd learn to cut a few corners, though.  The prospect of seeing Fincher slog through the two sequels to "Tattoo" is enough to make a Swedish winter seem appealing.